The stars were brighter than usual and my fingers hurt as they bridged the pencil in my hand onto paper.  Shining in the room the moon was giving me just enough light to place my heart from my hand to paper. My six-year-old mind was alive and my stubble of a pencil couldn’t keep up with my mind wild with stories that vented through my being like the bright moon that radiated outside my window.

It began there.  

A singular dream.

Catching fire from within, I wrote and wrote and broke through my fear that my grandma would find me up way past my bedtime.  Breathing heavily, I stopped mid-sentence that I was writing; “I will be an author someday.” I declared into the starlight bedroom.  “Someday, I will write books and people will read my words.” My six-year-old little self declared into the tremble of my heart’s desire and followed me throughout my days.

Dreams are so powerful.  They propel us, drive us, make us dig deeper than we know we can go.  They give us a rhythm we feel deep inside our souls, wanting to fill up our empty spaces so that we play the part we know we can become if we work hard enough. I wrote and wrote, poetry, stories, paradise on a writer’s white sanded beach.  I lived a painful journey that sometimes broke the hearts of counselors who would read my young words. I danced my life out on paper, through the heartache and devastation of a young life that produced things that children shouldn’t know to write about.  

Teenage heartbreak for me was missing my mother, her soft whisper in my ear was an illusion~and it brought forth some of my greatest poetry to date.  I dug deep into my sorrow of loss and it bled from my fingers as they burned through the tree that sacrificed its life for my craft. Writing found the light in me that I feared I couldn’t find.  The first time I was recognized for my turmoil in the form of poetry trying to write my story out, I was shocked. My English teacher told me that this part of me will never die. That our poetry is forever and is ever relatable, that I had talent thus having the ability to touch lives.

That day I realized that my childhood fantasy could be a reality some day.  I wanted so badly to have my words enriched in the minds and hearts of those that were lovely enough to read what I had to say.  It might be raw, painful and dark at times but I longed for my words to be in the world.

Dreaming is hard.  Fulfilling that goal is next to impossible at times.  Rejection a part of dreams but can face us as a shallow yet deep grave. Experiencing that is any author’s epitaph, it is a reality that we all face, but in a lot of ways, I feel along my journey the most rejection I’ve experienced has been the voices inside my own head.  Am I good enough? Who will really want to read my words? The messy parts that I am spitting into the world, who really want to summon my stories? Who will read what I have to say? Am I talented enough to have people read my words?

Is my tempo full enough that people I don’t know will want to read what I have to say? I swear it was such an upward battle overcoming my own fear of courage and lacking the skill of summoning hearts that would take in what I had to say.

The first book of mine fell in the form of a Romance Novel telling the story of two strong and broken people who found each other, fell in love and longed for change. Looking back, I wish I could have said what I really wanted to say the first time I published a book, but I wasn’t with God at the time and even though it isn’t anything I’d write again, it did open doors of great opportunity.  A readership that wanted to read my words when I was ready to say what I really wanted to write. That I have lived an extraordinary life of loss, love, and beauty in the form of an emotional epiphany; Sunset Vibrations gave me that. People were actually hungry for my words. Across the world, those I didn’t even know wanted to hear what I had to say. I gave my heart away to strangers, new friends that I needed to need me and in that we bonded into a place that made us intertwined forever. That day in February of 2015 I made my dream come true through blood, sweat, plenary of tears, I made it happen.  I did it. I was a published author.

Months later, I broke my heart into a million microcosmic pieces writing of my experience of infant and pregnancy loss, telling my heartbreaking tale of overcoming the most of impossible odds.  To rise above the devastation of losing two infant baby boys back to back, to write the conclusion that I could not only fall into the ocean of deep grief but that I could rise above the drowning of my own spirit as a mother.  That God could lift me out of the deep sea and give me my joy back as a gift in an offering of something only He can give. My book wasn’t about replacing a lost baby with a baby, but as miracles happen, that is what transpired.  After the two losses my family had to endure, we were given a gift, a prize, a gem in the sky so bright that we still all look at her in awe each and every day. A little girl we coin as our lifting out of a grave of pain and into the skylit dreams of God’s promise.

My second book, The Return to Happiness hit bestsellers lists shortly after publication, which meant so many women were reading my story!   I fell to my knees. My six-year-old self wept as she peered out into the moonlit room where her fingers bleed from the harsh pencil she kept writing her heart out with.  The teenage girl took a leap off the deep end of possibility as she crashed into the ability to write vulnerability that won her awards for poetry about the longing of a daughter for her mother.  My adult self met the author she was really meant to be, one who wrote from her pain, her struggle and her ability to dig out of that torrent to become something greater than the seemingly grim calling on her life.  

I saw it.  I kept it, and I ran with it into the sunset of my dreams.  Past the vibrations life seemed to constantly give me. I dove in.  I cried out to my dreams and made them my reality.

Seek out the secret place inside yourself that cries for more.  Find it, take hold of it and make it yours. Never give up on the dreams that call to you deep in the night.  Fight hard, train yourself in your craft whatever it may be. Dreams are made to come true, you are meant for greatness, I was and so are you.  In all the good times you have a voice, the darkness that meets you can be your catapult to make you crash harder into the surface you are meant to breakthrough and make your own.  Four years ago my little girl dream became my bigger reality and so can yours. Dig deep and go further. If I can do it, a girl born to struggle, but destined to overcome, you can too! Cling to it, claim it and make it happen.  I’m a living testament that you can make all your dreams come to pass. Four years later, people still read my words and I’m so humbled by that as it was always my ultimate longing, my seemingly impossible dream. Change the dialogue that tells you that you aren’t good enough, talented enough, strong or able and make it into endless possibilities.

The moon is shining on you tonight, dreams are meant to come true. The bad times can be what you fear the most, but those can produce your greatest belief in yourself, in your ability to reach the hearts of thousands, hundreds, or beautifully just one heart who needs to hear your story.  Never give up friends, never stop believing in what talent God has given you. Make it your moonlight, make it your destiny.